Unverified Voracity Wants More

Signed stuff by the bucket. Note for memorabilia-seekers: The From The Heart charity auction is up and going and has a ton of stuff for the man with an empty basement. As per usual, proceed go to charity.

this guy.

Bombed, but not enough. USC has gotten a severe punishment, with two-year bowl ban and serious scholarship penalties. Woo! Question, though: how does the basketball program get off with nothing more than the self-imposed penalties they've already taken when the USC compliance department explicitly told Tim Floyd to drop OJ Mayo because there was a 100% chance he was on the take. I think they got the football punishments about right—they should have voided all of USCs LOIs and dumped transfer restrictions for the duration of the probation—but their basketball program should have gotten the same treatment.

“As I read the decision by the NCAA, all I could get out of all of this was … I read between the lines and there was nothing but a lot of envy, and they wish they all were Trojans,” Garrett said to cheers Thursday night at the San Francisco Airport Marriott.

Comparing and contrasting USC's response with Michigan's is too obvious to even undertake. The NCAA should retroactively give them the death penalty, and then do it again. How much do you think it would cost to hire a private investigator to go after USC full-time? Surely there are enough people in the country willing to chip in that we could get this done for five bucks each, right?

Juniors and seniors to-be on the USC Trojans' football team, hit with a two-year postseason ban among other punishments, will be allowed to transfer to other FBS programs without having to sit out a season, the NCAA clarified to ESPN on Friday.

"The second school would have to submit a waiver asking to waive the year in residence, but NCAA rules allow for this waiver to be granted if a student-athlete's first school has a postseason ban in their sport," NCAA spokeswoman Stacey Osburn said in an e-mail to ESPN's Joe Schad.

A glance at the roster reveals that four of USC's top five corners are eligible to GTFO. I'm not sayin', I'm just sayin'. We are down one corner, after all.

Izzout? After Tom Izzo spent 9.5 hours in Cleveland yesterday—far more time than anyone who is not Serious About Cleveland would spend—the tenor of the Izzo chatter in East Lansing is trending towards grim resignation. Jim Comparoni, the nut who runs Michigan State's Rivals site and in my experience has never once said anything remotely negative about anything related to State, says it is a "very bad sign" that Izzo's scheduled golf appearance has been canceled and that football coaches say it "doesn't look good." There may be a 4PM press conference coming up today. There may not.

Don the tinfoil hats. If Dave Brandon is willing to bluntly state that he had nothing to do with Dorsey's failure to be admitted, I believe him:

"This is a decision that is owned by the admissions department, our admissions office," Brandon said. "It's always been owned by the admissions office. It is not unusual for a letter of intent to be signed with a prospective student-athlete where there's far more that needs to be done for the student-athlete to be admitted. It involves course work, it involves test scores, and a variety of criteria some of which is fact-based and where and how they went about improving their test scores."

You'd have to be foolhardy to make such a statement in a FOIA-laden environment, and Brandon doesn't seem foolhardy. As discussed yesterday, this had everything to do with grades.

Expansion-o-rama again. The to-date accurate Chip Brown has declared the interest level between Texas and A&M to be "NONE!!!!!!" which doesn't make a ton of sense given the very real benefits available to Texas and A&M if they were to join the CIC—financial benefits that dwarf the amount of money athletics makes, causing the Big Ten partisans in the expansion game to declare him a useful stooge for athletic directors wishing to get a message out, which kind of does make sense.

World Cup linkage. One: GOLAZO! More footie strategy at Zonal Marking, which has tackled the US side "good, but need tactical tweaks" the Slovenians, a typical hardworking, honest, boring 4-4-2, and the Algerians, who were mainly 3-5-2 but are apparently going 4-4-2 for the WC, possibly because of a run of poor recent results. The Algerian goaltender is described as "very, very dodgy," something that takes doing at the African Cup of Nations.

I am not an expert on the CIC, but I do work in institutional research administration, and I think Mr. Brew over here is correct about the benefits of the CIC being rather overblown. Unless the CIC has some VERY unique relationship with the federal government, most of that funding is coming from regular grants and contracts that I am sure Texas and A&M researchers are well aware of how to go about getting. The coordination or traffic-cop function is nice, and bigger proposals can get hung up on those kinds of issues (competing with people you should be collaborating with instead), but I don't think there is really a ton of actual money sitting in the CIC office that they are shoveling out the door.

I don't know much about the CIC, but in my work at a research institution I've found that most of the money is obtained through direct grant requests by the principal investigators and their labs. I suspect that the CIC may help a bit in coordination (esp. amongst inter-institutional research), but otherwise the money is always available to applicants irrespective of their membership. Still, the points made by Brew certainly do make it appealing.

I also think this is true. Though I don't have any special knowledge of the financial side of things, I don't think there is any major academic financial benefit to CIC membership. There has been a quote passed around which seems to imply that the CIC oversees a massive research fund, when in fact all the quote is implying is that the member universities in sum have massive research budgets.

When I was a student at UM one summer I wanted to take a class which was not offered at Michigan in the summer, but was at MSU. The CIC arrangement was going to make this very easy: I wouldn't have to apply for admission to MSU or apply to Michigan to have the credits transferred, etc.

I didn't end up doing this anyway, but I think this is the primary sort of benefit you get from CIC membership...streamlined exchanges, both for students and faculty.

I don't want to start a new topic on this because we have had so many already.

I read that Nebraska still has a meeting with the regents today to discuss joining the Big10. Is this merely a formality or are there still obstacles that need to be hurdled before Nebraska can leave the Big12?

“Regardless of what happens in that appeal, we know this: SC is more powerful than anything else,” Kiffin said. “The university, the football program, the basketball program -- no matter what they try to do to us, it won’t matter.”

Thanks Lane, I never thought of it that way. I'm sure your fans feel much better now.

grave is getting deeper by the minute. I am not sure Garrett is really seeing this thing for what it is. Really bizarre.

If Lebron James is going to resign with Cleveland, Izzo would have to be CRAZY not to take that job. Spartan fans should stop freaking out about this, MSU basketball is its own brand now, I am quite sure they will be fine.

What we are seeing with USC is an AD that thought they were untouchable, especially after the NCAA accepted the sanctions for Mayo - who everyone knew was trouble the day he started "recruiting himself." I'm sure USC figured that they were one of the dominant teams in college football, and that the NCAA would never have the gumption to actually take them down. And I do think that if Carroll was still at the helm, the sanctions might have been less severe, as Carroll still has some major name recognition. But with his departure, coupled with Kiffin's arrival and all the bad press he generated the past 2 years, it made total sense that the NCAA would throw the book (deservedly) at USC.

That fan base, though, has no idea the level of pain they have in store. A 2-year postseason ban, plus some inevitable attrition and reduced depth through loss of scholarships, spells at least 5-6 years of mediocrity (at least by USC standards) in the future, if not more. I would be surprised if USC legitimately contends for an MNC this decade, and with Kiffin on board, they have to be careful about any more infractions, no matter how minor, while on this probation. With this punishment, I wouldn't be surprised if USC cut ties with Kiffin in the not-to-distant future, replacing him with a "good guy" to show the NCAA that they are going to run a clean ship.

Realistically, if USC goes back to mediocrity, their fans just won't got to the games. Their stadium doesn't sell out for Pac 10 games when the Trojans are good. If USC becomes a perrenial 8-4 or 7-5 team, people just won't go.

I totally agree - USC football fans are notorious bandwagoners. I just think the fanbase is unprepared for the downturn this program is likely to experience in the coming years.

As an aside, one of my friends' sister went to UMiami for undergrad, and said the same thing happened there. When they were competing for NCs, the place was (usually) full, but anything less and the stadium is 1/2 empty.

you can easily understand why he hired Kiffin. Given the ongoing NCAA investigation, that decision has to go down in college football history as the most brazenly obtuse and self-destructive "fuck you" ever uttered by an athletic director.

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." — Mencken